Cat Burglars

by Jessica Miller
(Grand Rapids, MI)

One night, my youth group was having a lock-in at the church and I had a rude awakening. Lauren and Christina, who are excitable individually but much worse together, believed that they were seeing headlights appearing and disappearing out of the back windows.

They began to hear the most horrible cries of pain, and were sure that someone was being murdered out back, and then, they heard the sounds of someone breaking into the church. By the time I woke up, they had no semblance of coherence left. They screamed, I screamed, and, (still screeching like deranged fruit-bats) we began to tear at our sleeping youth director's pajamas.

We managed to wake up poor youth-director-Paula, who couldn't figure out what was going on. Catching "OMG...BREAKING IN...OMGOMGOMG!!!" in the shrill torrent, she naturally dialed the police to inform them that a lunatic was breaking into the church. Mosi, one of the guys in our group, was woken up in the midst of all this. He was annoyed, and also had enough sense to know that nothing was actually going on; so, when Paula gave us the instructions from the police, ("be absolutely quiet and stay away from the doors and windows until we get there")

Mosi took it upon himself to scare the crap out of the rest of us. He strolled easily over to the door, poked his head out, and yelled "HEY! ANY KILLERS OUT THERE? HOW ABOUT BURGLARS? HALLLLOOOOOOOO!" We swore a lot and threw things at him. When the police arrived, they informed us with some exasperation that the headlights we were seeing were actually the motion-activated lights out back, going off in response to our alleged murder victim - as it turns out, the horrible cries of pain were actually from a couple of neighborhood cats who were fighting. The best part? Patrick, Josh, and Steven, our other three guys, slept through everything.